Busy Busy Few Weeks
Posted: April 22, 2012 Filed under: Business | Tags: Boy Meets Tractor, Fox 25, OCD, Radio Times, The Disappointments, WHYY Leave a comment »I need to make one of my at this point customary apologies for the dearth of content in this space. But the good news is that I’ve been working on a plethora of horrifically-personal, anxiety-inducing content for your enjoyment. It’s either feast or famine here at Also Sprach Fletchathustra.
Last Wednesday I had the opportunity to appear on the Fox 25 Boston morning show. It’s a quick segment, but does a good job of explaining some of the underlying principles of OCD. And if you’ve read the book and developed an image of me as some slick sonofagun, here’s your opportunity to observe my stiff demeanor and robotic bass monotone firsthand.
And on Friday I was lucky enough to appear on Philadelphia’s Radio Times. I appeared with Dr. Jon Grayson, author of the seminal Freedom from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and was interviewed by the wonderful Maiken Scott. I’m really happy with how this program turned out – we tackle OCD from personal and clinical perspectives, and it seems like we reached a number of parents who had their own stories to share. Trigger warning for suicide and stuff like that.
Finally, I want to point any visitors in the direction of The Disappointments, a sketch comedy group formed by my friends from Swarthmore and I. We had a great show at the college last night, hosted by our sketch comedy alma mater Boy Meets Tractor for their annual Comedy Weekend, so keep an eye on our site – fingers crossed, we’ll have the new material up soon.
So that’s it for now! Assuming trends related to my frequency of posting continue, please check back in six months for a twelve simultaneous posts and a novella, and then in ten years for a 2000-page prose poem retelling of The Odyssey.
Huffington Post Article
Posted: February 11, 2012 Filed under: Business | Tags: Huffington Post, OCD Leave a comment »This is highly unexpected, but I submitted an article on OCD to the Huffington Post earlier this week, and apparently they have pretty quick turnaround time on publication.
You can check out the article here. It’s a basic description of OCD written for the layman, combined with some jokes, because that’s how we roll around here.
SONGS ABOUT MENTAL ILLNESS, PART 1
Posted: February 6, 2012 Filed under: Mental health, Music, Popcult | Tags: depression, Gnarls Barkley, Gravediggaz, Joy Division, OCD, suicide, X-Ray Spex Leave a comment »
I struggled with what to name this article: “Top Songs About Mental Illness”? or “Best”? But those are both very subjective terms, and some of these songs aren’t even explicitly about mental illness, and really can anything about mental illness be considered “top?” So I won’t claim this list is comprehensive. But for what it’s worth, here’s a list of songs by popular artists that make me wince, with sympathy and profound discomfort, every time I hear them.
TRIGGER WARNING FOR SUICIDE LIKE WHOA
You may have heard of this Cee-Lo Green – as a matter of fact, he wrote another song about mental disability a few years back that was something of a modest success. But in true hipster fashion, I’d like to instead call out this deep cut from Gnarls Barkley’s debut album, St. Elsewhere. Green’s voice has a hoarse, plaintive quantity on this track, which juxtaposes delicate flamenco guitar with a pummeling drumline. He sounds overwhelmed, both by the music and the song’s emotional content, even before the track deteriorates into record scratches and a dissonant piano melody that sounds almost like it could have come from…
…these guys. You probably know what happened to Ian Curtis: if you don’t, I can’t tell you anything about him that his music doesn’t. This track is cyclical: it accelerates, the verse begins, Curtis gives us a moment of hope (“Just for one moment, I thought I’d found my way”) before crushing it (“Destiny unfolded, I watched it slip away”). And then back to that awesome (both in the “kickass” and “inspiring the fear of God” senses of the word”) bassline. The form complements the emotional content: anyone who has suffered from depression will recognize the downward spiral, interrupted by moments of desperate hope before the darkness returns.
But enough suicide! (That is a lie. We will be returning to suicide shortly). X-Ray Spex tackles your favorite anxiety disorder and mine (by which I mean the one that almost killed me) on this almost-title track from their all-time classic record, “Germfree Adolescence.” It’s a love song, at least technically, but the romance is highly unorthodox: “Your deodorant smells nice” is not a common pick-up line in pop music. “Blow disinfectant in her eyes” is not a conventional demonstration of affection. The synth riff is charming but soon becomes maddeningly repetitive; Poly Styrene’s vocals, superficially sweet, become increasingly cracked and desperate as the song proceeds. The song botches the pathology behind OCD, and disappointingly focuses on contamination, which is only one shade of an entire horrible rainbow of OCD symptoms. But it captures the experience of the disorder extremely well.
Not to be confused with the actual suicide hotline, which is probably a better resource if you find yourself considering taking your own life. This song isn’t completely free of the mentalist, “only rich people suffer mental illness” attitude I complained about in Das Racist’s “Puerto Rican Cousins” a while back. In Poetic’s verse he rhymes: “Hey little rich kid what’s your beef? Come and tell the grim reaper all of your grief.” But then he immediately challenges that by complicating the listener’s identity: “Maybe you’re a bastard child, you think / Your mom and dad are white but you’re dark as ink.” Poetic was apparently trying to comment on hip-hop’s increasing commercialization, and its simultaneous appeal to privileged white kids, but at the same time he touches on the consuming economic and racial guilt that (in my experience) accompanies depression.
The other verses are just as brutal. Frukwan describes a figure who, in a Looney Tunes-esque gauntlet of violence, tries to kill himself again and again without succeeding. RZA (as the Rzarector) urges the listener to “[c]omit suicide and I’ll bring you back to life”, much as depression promises that killing yourself will bring stop your pain; he then presents a gory sequence of eager sacrifices, none of whom are subsequently rzarected. Rather than offer empty promises that life gets better, the Gravediggaz shock the listener with graphic descriptions of self-inflicted violence, and then soberly observe how these attempts didn’t fix anything. And better than any other song I’ve heard, their rhymes capture the incessant, mocking self-loathing of depression.
NEXT TIME: Eating disorders, self-injury, and the best worst song about madness that isn’t “They’re Coming to Take Me Away.”
Coming Out of the Asylum: The Challenges of Disclosing Mental Illness
Posted: January 11, 2012 Filed under: Mental health | Tags: depression, mental illness, OCD, stigma Leave a comment »So I was directed to this post by Jenny Lawson at Bloggess. It’s in two parts: a brief essay written in the nastiest depths of the author’s periodic depression, and then a reflection written after she recovered. I have OCD, but my particular brand of anxiety sometimes takes on the rancid bouquet of depression, and Lawson’s post resonated with me. Suffice to say it is extraordinary challenging to get through ordinary tasks and responsibilities while trying to manage depressive, self-destructive thoughts. Everyday mistakes, like arriving at work a few minutes late, become moral failures so atrocious they can only be rectified by suicide. You pray no one criticizes you, even if their complaints are reasonable and well intentioned, because any disapproval becomes a screaming indictment of your basic value as a human being. And if your slip-up occurred because of your internal struggle: expect despise yourself all the more, to be swept up in a maelstrom of self-loathing where your condition is a sign of weakness and cause for self-recrimination that worsens your condition.
Living in Arkham Asylum
Posted: September 21, 2011 Filed under: Geek, Mental health | Tags: Batman, comics, DC Comics, mental illness, OCD Leave a comment »When you start to conceptualize the mentally ill as a minority group, strange things begin to happen in popular culture, and previously acceptable entertainments become kind of abominable. Consider, for example, this NYTimes takedown of DC Comics.
Understand: I love Batman. Batman is one of my favorite things. But consider this summary:
“In a fantastic urban dystopia, masked Anglo-Saxon billionaire anonymously beats the crap out of the mentally ill.”
Replace “the mentally ill” with “African-Americans” or “Jews” or “gay people” and that starts to sound pretty goddamn problematic, doesn’t it? And it doesn’t help that Batman’s “insane” antagonists (Joker, Two-Face, the Riddler) fit a very particular comic book stereotype of mental illness. Generally speaking, mental illness does not cause you to become a criminal genius clown anarchist with a distressingly attractive girlfriend:
Short hipster girls with severe personality disorders: you are my personal Kryptonite.
Mental illness makes you count things, or want to die, or shit yourself. Once you accept that psychological problems are a real thing, that cause real people to suffer terribly, then portraying the afflicted as malevolent clowns or scar-faced vigilantes or sexy nurses becomes remarkably callous.
You can’t even get really mad at this kind of insensitivity: it’s so frivolous, and so deeply ingrained in our culture, that whining about it is useless. Try telling someone, next time you hear them use the word “crazy,” that they shouldn’t do so because it’s disrespectful to the mentally ill. See what kind of response you get. All you can do is point it out when a particularly painful example occurs, and do your best to educate people.
To conclude, here’s a wonderful piece of fan art depicting the Batman himself as suffering from your favorite psychological ailment and mine, OCD:
By Ulises Farinas.
On the Wings of Madness
Posted: September 13, 2011 Filed under: Mental health, Videogames | Tags: Angry Birds, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, OCD, seriously those goddamn claw machines should be outlawed Leave a comment »You guys have surely heard of this game by now, right?
It’s a kick in the pants, as far as I’m concerned. It’s the kind of thing your mother would love. I’ve only played the crappy online version linked above, but I really dug it. Look at little guy. Look at the righteous fury on his face. Those eyebrows! Woe be unto whoever that Kahlo-esque half of a crosshair is sighted on. He’s a paraplegic lump of fluff and fury with nothing to lose.
I’ve heard people compare the game’s addictiveness to OCD, but for what it’s worth I don’t think the comparison is necessarily justified. With OCD, you repeat the same task over and over again to reduce anxiety or protect from some dramatic loss: if you are afraid of contamination you wash your hands, if you are afraid of damnation you pray. With Angry Birds, though, you are solving a puzzle. You are trying different tactics and slowly refining your methods. There is no anxiety, only pleasure. And anger. Always anger.
I did, however, have a minor OCD stumble recently, related to our friend the Angry Bird. Specifically, I was at Market East station in Center City, commuting to my new job, and I discovered a claw machine. And inside was this guy:
OH MY GOD I WANTED ONE. I WANTED ONE SO BAD. Listen guys I would throw him at everything: at blocks, at bricks, at pigs, at friends, at neighbors, at the elderly, at the cat. We’d take on the world, my angry bird and I. We’d knock down the Berlin Wall. We’d win the hearts of the world or die trying.
I put a dollar into the claw machine and I carefully lined my sights on the little guy. I ran around the side of the machine so I could check the claw’s position on the Z- as well as the X-axis. I prayed to a god I know longer understand: let me have this Angry Bird, my Lord, let him be your vessel to me, let him be my wingless Gabriel; and together we will smite your enemies on this earth, we will become an instrument of your heavenly wrath.
The claw dropped. The bird was surrounded b the machine’s talons. And then, the claw began to lift, without first closing. It rose and rose, and then snapped shut, at least an inch over the bird’s head. Too high up to even graze the tuft of feathers on his little angry head. I relized I’d been ripped off. The game was rigged, and it was obvious that the machine was designed so that it was impossible to snatch even a single fluffy prize from its infernal gut.
Naturally, I gave it another three tries.
So this is how my OCD manifests, these days, in my everyday life. It wasn’t a terrible loss, thankfully. It was only $2. But in retrospect I can see the machinations of my disorder at work: the absolute conviction that my life would not be okay without this Angry Bird, and the “just one more try” problem-solving. In the past, I’ve lost literal years of my life to this behavior, trying another ritual behavior and then another in the hopes that, somehow, this time it would work. And since my hospitalization I’ve learned that this isn’t an effective strategy: in aggregate, the time lost and pain endured repeating these rituals is far greater than whatever they were intended to prevent. With my OCD, I had to learn to resist this pattern, and accept the uncertainties and disappointments of life without trying to resolve them through compulsive behavior.
It’s the same thing here, although thankfully on a smaller scale, and I’m thankful that I was able to snap out of it quickly. I am angry, but so help me God I will never again be so mad.
“Can You Imagine Fire Forever?”
Posted: September 5, 2011 Filed under: Mental health, Religion | Tags: Evangelism, hell, OCD, scrupulosity Leave a comment »So I walking home from a delicious colon-destroying burrito bowl at my local Chip-oh-tull, and I happen to pass a street-corner preacher and his entourage. This is the sort of thing that, before my hospitalization, would have set me into an incoherent frenzy of Catholic kid scrupulosity. It doesn’t really bother me any more, thankfully, which is one of the many, many reasons that I am grateful every day for my OCD treatment.
But anyway this guy starts by telling passersby that he loves them. He sounds sincere, which is nice, because loving the sinner is sort of a big deal in Christianity and I get the sense that a lot of evangelical types don’t really try very hard at it. And then he starts talking about hell. “Can you imagine eternal torture,” he asks, “can you imagine fire forever?”
That struck me, because it’s sort of a lovely turn of phrase, but also because of how shallow it is both theologically and psychologically. One of the things I came to understand through my hospitalization and treatment is the principle of habitation – that over time the human mind can adapt to any stimulus, no matter how unbearable it may seem. That’s what let me overcome my OCD. Instead of obsessing over the things that frightened me, I had to face them down, and learned to deal with them without psychosis. Eventually they stopped bothering me at all.
Which is why the Christianist (to borrow a useful neologism from my bro Andrew Sullivan) conception of hell baffles me. I touch on this a little in the memoir, so hopefully my publisher will not mind me toeing similar territory here, but the basis of my argument is this: Hell doesn’t make sense. Not only is it profoundly unimaginative (what will God do to you if you’re bad? he’ll set you on fire! how long will you be on fire? you’ll be on fire forever!) but it also fails to account for the most basic mechanisms of human psychology. We cannot be tortured forever, because given enough time we will learn to adapt to the pain. You can argue that no, seriously, Hell hurts really really bad, but that doesn’t change anything, because if we are capable of perceiving a stimulus we are capable of habituating to it. Hell does not make sense. It wouldn’t work.
I swung back later and a couple of long-haired Penn students had decided to engage the preacher and his friends in debate. The evangelicals had started to go on about the homosexy, which is a strange choice on a college campus, because if you’re going Leviticus up in that bitch then surely self-pleasuring and wearing of garments of two or more fabrics are the more urgent transgressions to address. Anyway I listened for a bit, and decided I was done when the kids invoked Godwin’s Law (positing the longer an unmediated argument goes, the greater the likelihood someone, somehow, will be compared to Hitler – Hitler is the black hole of our discourse, an irresistible singularity to which all rhetoric is drawn). It was futile, of course, and a little silly on both sides. The irony of evangelism (any evangelism, Christian or agnostic or breatharian) is that most of the time you will push your opponent further back into his own argument.
Apologies to anyone who stumbles on this trolling Google and is angered. These are just idle thoughts, shaped by fairly unconventional life experiences, and you’re welcome to share any disagreement in the comments. Please don’t take anything I say too seriously – I am, verifiably, at least a little crazy.
Selected Excerpts from Triggered: A Memoir of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
Posted: August 23, 2011 Filed under: Autobio, Business, Mental health | Tags: Catholicism, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, OCD, Swarthmore College, Triggered 4 Comments »(A few weeks back my editor, Rob, sent me a selection of what he thought were the strongest quotes from the memoir. I asked if I could put them up here, and he said he thought that was a fine idea. Consider this advance advertising copy for the memoir, for myself, by myself…)
On OCD as “the doubting disorder”:
“Consider the possibility that, at any moment, the end of the world could occur. The ground will crack, the clouds spark with red lightning, hungry waters rise. The sky hums with annihilating angels. Imagine the final crisis of man. Now: I would like you to prove, with absolute certainty, that this is not true…”
On OCD and sex:
“If a girl accepts an invitation to help count the tiles on your bedroom ceiling, then she will probably be disappointed when she realizes you were speaking literally.”
On OCD and religion:
“I have found Catholicism and obsessive compulsive disorder to be deeply sympathetic to one another. One is a repressive construct founded in existential terror, barely restrained by complex, arbitrary ritual behaviors; the other is an anxiety disorder.”
On OCD and the “imp of the mind”:
“Imagine the worst thing in the world. Picture it. Construct it, carefully and deliberately, in your mind. Take all the time you need but be careful not to omit anything. Imagine it happening to you, to people you love. Look around, pick out the most vulnerable-looking person in the room. Imagine it happening to them. Now try not to think about it. Forget everything, entirely. Now.”
On the seductiveness of OCD:
“It was in this moment of release that my OCD seduced me. This is how the disorder perpetuates itself, by occasionally rewarding trauma and neurosis with brief moments of relief. Every so often, everything will work, and you will somehow convince yourself that you are safe, and the disorder will claim credit. I had struck a bargain with the OCD, and after long months of struggle the disorder seemed to fulfill its promise. The transaction was complete. In that moment I became subservient to it.”
On OCD humor:
“By the sink, I noticed a perfunctory sign warning readers to wash their hands. It was scrawled with graffiti: NO YOU CAN’T GERMS ARE UNPREVENTABLE AND INESCAPABLE.”
On literary-inspired OCD:
“My first-full blown bout with OCD I owe to Kurt Vonnegut. My third-grade teacher, thoughtlessly neglecting the handful of her charges suffering from undiagnosed madness, told us about a book she was reading. That book was Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. In her pre-digested version of the novel, the world was threatened by the evil molecule Ice-9…”
On choosing a college:
“With self-inflicted jubilance my mother and I spun around and rushed back to the school store, looking for official regalia I could stamp myself with. I chose a pair of t-shirts. The first of these read ‘The People’s Republic of Swarthmore,’ and was printed with a hammer and sickle. The other shirt featured the official Swarthmore College logo and then read in a large clear font: ‘Guilt Without Sex.’ This was the place I decided was home.”
On OCD and well-meaning social workers:
“Part of the problem, she suggested, was that the depression itself often prevented me from asking for help, and it might be useful for us to create a special term I could use to let them know when I was badly hurting. She suggested ‘crumping.’ We will consider the implications of this for a moment. I am curled in the bathroom, pills strewn across the floor, rivulets of blood running from my slashed wrists. My father kicks the door off of its hinges and my distraught parents rush in. Honey are you alright what’s wrong tell us. I try to reassure them. ‘It’s alright Ma, I’m only crumping.’
On love, apathy, and the family pet:
“It has been suggested that the opposite of love is not hatred but apathy. There is nothing so utterly dismissive as the ‘fuck off’ of a cat.”
On OCD and the rest of us:
“So to anyone reading who also struggles with mental illness: I am sorry. I am so sorry. I am sorry for what you have been through, and I am sorry that no one, certainly not I, can understand the unique nature of your suffering. If I could give you advice: learn to lay your burden down, if you can. Do what you have to so that you can heal. It may help you to talk about what you have endured; it helped me. Does it sound embarrassing, trite, if I claim that I feel a kinship between us? I don’t care. I don’t care at all any more. You are my brother, my sister.
Now for the rest of you bastards…”
You can also check out some advance reviews of Triggered here.
Sexy OCD: It Is Apparently a Thing
Posted: July 11, 2011 Filed under: Autobio, Mental health, Popcult | Tags: contamination, Fred Durst, Karrine Steffans, Limp Bizkit, Nathan Rabin, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, OCD, the sexy Leave a comment »People find some kinds of mental illness to be sexy. But never OCD. A few years ago, in the first essay of the first published version of TRIGGERED, I wrote the following: “[OCD] isn’t even sexy, and I’d love to have ‘sexy’ mental illness, scowling and smoking, writing mediocre poetry to express my inner tormention; attractive women throwing themselves at me, convinced they could ‘fix’ me, and me not necessarily saying anything to discourage them. It’s too bad. I bet I could totally pull off the tortured artist thing. “ I wince a little as I read that, because my writing was a little over-the-top back then, but I still believe it. Some forms of mental illness encourage moody or self-destructive behavior that, weirdly, people find attractive. It’s just that OCD isn’t usually one of them.
That said, I found a really weird exception that I wanted to share. I’m a big fan of the Onion A.V. Club, the arts and entertainment section of the famous satirical newspaper, and particularly of critic and junk-culture connoisseur Nathan Rabin. One of Rabin’s regular columns is called “My Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club,” where Rabin digs around in used book stores to find long-forgotten celebrity memoirs, and reads them in search of overlooked literary merit and also tawdry Hollywood sex secrets. A while back I was perusing his older entries, and something caught my eye.
The book reviewed is Karrine Steffans’ Confessions of a Video Vixen. It’s a very funny review of what sounds like a very terrible book, but I do not recommend you click that link because both are unimaginably filthy. This author was in the news a while back for getting her book on the bestseller list, and for improbably dating professional liberal egghead Bill Maher. Confessions is an allegedly empowering humpalogue of the various rich and powerful men Steffans encountered; many of these encounters are described in anguishing detail, through Steffans’ breathless gossip-girl prose, and Rabin quotes these passages copiously and with glee. You will probably need to read a shower if you look at the review, let alone if you open the book itself, which sounds like the literary equivalent of an unstaffed nightclub restroom.
What stood out was Steffans’ description of her encounter with Fred Durst, detestable human being and frontman of a group that produces music and is called Limp Bizkit:
Fred ordered five different entrées, just for himself. I was confused but I didn’t want to seem young and inexperienced, so I just watched his movements… He was grand, taking tiny forkfuls from each dish and repeating that move a few times. Then, just that fast, he was done, leaving the majority of the food behind. I was in awe. I had never really wasted food before, and right then I knew that one day I would be able to eat whatever I wanted, however much I wanted, and summon someone to take the plates away…With all of his tattoos, body piercing and worn way of dress Fred had an air of prestige. I silently hoped for him to want me.
What follows is a tasteful romantic encounter, complete with a painstakingly detailed depiction of Durst’s throbbing, erect, tastefully pierced Bizkit. I will spare you this (the link is still there, like the Ark of the Covenant, and though you risk face-melting annihilation cannot resist opening it). What struck me about that passage is this:
Fred Durst has OCD.
Seriously. Google it, it’s in interviews and everything. I don’t think I’m misreading this, either, because these are textbook obsessive-compulsive behaviors. Dude has straight-up, classic, Monk-style obsessive-compulsive disorder. As far as I’m concerned, there is literally zero chance that this poor asshole is not agonizing over his contaminated food.
I’m not sure if there’s anything more I can say about that. If anything, I suppose it shows how people misinterpret or make excuses for even very obvious signs of mental illness, especially when dealing with the rich and powerful. I guess you could use this to argue for wider education and treatment. But mostly its just a demonstration of how even wealthy, irritating, thoroughly reprehensible people struggle with their mental health, and how they still deserve our compassion. Even this guy.
I am experiencing Buddha-level compassion and forgiveness while staring at this image
The madness of airport security
Posted: June 10, 2011 Filed under: Mental health | Tags: body scanners, civil rights, gratuitous LOST references, OCD, TSA Leave a comment »I’m writing this after flying to visit my family in Massachusetts, so travel is on my mind; and because I’m writing this in Massachusetts, only a few minutes from McLean Hospital where I underwent extensive psychiatric treatment, OCD is on my mind (more so than it usually is).
I’d like to talk about airport security today. Specifically, I’d like to talk about those sexy nekkid scanners that caused all the fuss last Thanksgiving, when the perpetually pudgy American populace freaked out about the possibility of TSA employees leering at and/or prodding their turkey bits.
I, personally, did not have a problem with this. I am not ashamed of my appendage. I have no problem with the US Government scrutinizing my appendage for national security purposes. I am not personally aware of any way that my appendage could represent a threat to the republic, but if creepy Uncle Sam wants to examine it that’s his prerogative.
But as I continued to read about these new scanning/groping procedures they started to seem really dicey.[1] 1) The scanners cannot necessarily detect explosives or weapons, because terrorists have learned to use tactics employed by drug smugglers to hide their payload. 2) The scanners have proven ineffective at detecting weapons concealed by undercover TSA agents, and also at detecting weapons concealed by some guy from Jersey City who forgot he was carrying them. 3) Agents have given patdowns to elderly breast cancer survivors, elderly bladder cancer survivors with sensitive urostomy bags (with predictable results), shirtless autistic children, and traumatized toddlers. 4) TSA agents and airline staff alike also despise the procedure and find it disgusting and demoralizing, which is definitely preferable to them being totally into it.
Now, these criticisms should all be discarded if the scan/grope fusion technique can be demonstrably proven to make us safer. But for now, it seems as if our airports are using a security technique that 1) we hate, 2) they hate, and 3) doesn’t work all the time.
Which brings me to obsessive compulsive disorder.
I spent close to 3 months receiving extensive treatment for my OCD, and if you’re interested in learning more about that misadventure than there’s a book coming out you may be interested in wink wink nudge nudge. I understand OCD on a pretty thorough level, both from extensive work with experts in the field and also from the fact that it lives inside my brain and wants to kill me. To make this as quick and painless as possible: OCD isn’t all about cleaning and counting. OCD is about the intolerance of uncertainty. If there’s something that frightens you, OCD encourages you to perform uncomfortable, irritating, demeaning, and frequently useless ritual behaviors again and again, just because they might make things better. So if you’re afraid of infection, for example, it makes you wash your hands over and over, because there’s a tiny tiny chance that if you don’t you might die. It doesn’t matter that you’ve gotten all of the benefit you will from that first wash, and that you’ve spent a half an hour in the bathroom and your hands are starting to chafe and bleed – it might make you safer if you wash again so damnit, you’ll wash again.[2]
Back to the TSA: this kind of bureaucracy is institutionalized OCD. If you’re strip-searching children and bursting the swollen pee-bags of the infirm, then you’ve clearly exhausted most reasonable security measures. You aren’t really doing anything to make us safer. You’re following rules purely for the sake of following rules, devoid of reason or propriety. But, they demand: if there’s a 1/a googleplex chance that these procedures will stop the next 9/11, isn’t our duty to do anything we can…?
No. No, it isn’t. Risk is endemic to life. It’s certainly endemic to air travel, where you’re in a giant metal can hurtling through the air at hundreds of miles an hour, and anything from a storm to an electromagnetic anomaly generated by a mysterious island to an unlucky pelican could mean terrible death for everyone aboard. We can’t make flying perfectly safe. The TSA has claimed it has the right to strip-search every man, woman and child in the United States of America if it wants to and I have to ask: do we really want to go there? How much embarrassment and inconvenience are we willing to accept for the miniscule reduction of a possibly-nonexistent threat? At what point do we decide that more rules, more red tape, more rituals aren’t really the answer?
Anyway: like I said I’ll be home in MA for the next week, and largely without internet access, so I’ll be forgoing blog posts for the short term. Thanks to everyone whose been reading. I put off blogging for the longest time, but I’ve been doing this for a month now and I’m really happy with how it’s gone. See you in another life, bruthas.
[1] That Philly2Philly article I cite points to Israeli racial profiling practices as an unproblematic solution to this problem, which makes me cringe a little, so please do not take my link to their article as an endorsement of indiscriminately groping brown people.
[2] This is a highly condensed and simplified explanation of the disorder, and if you’re interested in a more thorough explanation then OH CHRIST PLEASE BUY THE BOOK WHEN IT COMES OUT I EAT EASY MAC THREE NIGHTS A WEEK I AM POOR AND A FAILURE.
